Bias
by Armelle-Madeline
Summary: When bashing someone with a stuffed snake means you'll love them forever, even if you have to pay out many Galleons for good Scotch to get them drunk.


I know what it's like to love and I know what it's like to lose. I lost him , I suppose. Then again, I never really had him.

I wanted him. When I was seven, and hitting him over the head with my stuffed snake (I was a precocious child and phallic symbols were all the rage) was a sign of my outrage that he was prettier than I was. Something about the way the sunlight through mullioned windows ripples over white silk hair. He even had blue eyes, the bastard, big and curious, looking out of a tiny pointed little face.

I whacked him over the head with my snake, then asked him to be my best friend. I was a bright child. I always knew that if I couldn't have him, with all the bright sparkling selfishness of childhood, then I wanted to be his best friend. To know all his secrets. To sit by his side, and watch him pout with annoyance, or poke his tongue out as he concentrated. Later on to lie in the bed next to his, and listen to his sleepy accounts of how he'd best rip Potter's guts out. In Slytherin, that's akin to love poetry. Especially from him.

I never really wanted anyone else. I wanted him so much I wanted to crawl inside his skin to sit next to him. I wanted to make myself tiny and sew myself into his heart, so he'd carry me around, get used to me being there, right to the bone, before he noticed me.

Which is odd, because I like being noticed.

I wanted to be, oh thousands of things. Taller, with perhaps green eyes, or maybe blue. I wanted chocolates, on Patrick Swayze's chest. I wanted money, enough to buy happiness the way everyone else does. I wanted to be what he wanted.

I was always around. The best friend. I listened to long and oh-so-dull discussions on Pansy; debated the merits of scrolls of parchment tied up with pink ribbon or green. I had to step in at that point – he was making himself look weak. She had to come to him, why not? I always did.

I sat myself in his lap half the time. He put up with it, the way I knew he would. A little wriggle leftwards, scooting my bottom right over that nice bit of anatomy, placing myself right where I wanted to be. He didn't seem to mind, except when he was thinking hard, or busy. Or tired.

I learnt how to fit with his moods. When he was laughing, I'd play the fool, pander to his humour, flirt outrageously. Well, I always have flirted outrageously with him, so that wasn't most of the bother. When he was ranting about the latest Quidditch loss – something I could never understand the significance of, honestly, balls and hoops. How unsubtle a substitute for hormones can there be? But when it mattered to him, I strained from trying not to yawn until my eyes watered, and stroked his leg (well, wouldn't you?) and told him it didn't matter, that he was a better Seeker, a better person, a better leader. When he was tired, he didn't want me to flirt with him. He doesn't even really like to be touched, when he's tired. He'll forget to eat, so he has to be coaxed. I have to tug away the parchment like it's a game, and pull on his robes and make myself so much of a pest that he can't ignore me. Notice me, notice me. And then he'll eat. Or I'll have to help him up to the dorm, wake him when he's fallen asleep in the armchair nearest the fire.

And later, heave him upstairs to bed when he was drunk. After mad, bad nights in Hogsmede, of course out-of-bounds, and after dark. When he was as pissed as a newt, and if I wanted to, I could have had my wicked way with him.

Trouble is, as much as fucking him would have been a cure-all for some of the cobwebs, I wanted him always. A best friend can stay by his side forever, can listen and stroke and tease him out of moods. If I slept with him when he was drunk, I would have lost that precious place, where Draco Malfoy cared. It was a tiny little scrap of him, but I'd guard it like a dragon.

I'd never begin anything, with him.

It was agony, sometimes. When I'd listen to his accounts of fumblings with Pansy – well, who else could he tell? Crabbe and Goyle? Kisses in a cupboard, when I poured scads of scathing acid on his encounters and made him laugh at his own foolishness. I never told him how much I hated Pansy at times. Fiercely, passionately, until I lay in my bed and shook with rage. When I listened to his sleepy yawns between mumbled stories of his family. Of his expectations.

It's prosaic, they say. He would repeat it flatly; Death Eater, married with heirs. Note the plural, very important to purebloods. Yes, I am bitter, how clever of you to notice. I wanted to rescue him from a fate worse than death, locked into a loveless marriage with Malfoy juniors one and two. Or worse than that – a marriage filled with respect and love – from a woman. I didn't just want to rescue him. I wanted him to rescue me.

And then there were the times he took my entire world in his hands, and laughing like a child, smashed it deliberately into a thousand pieces. When his curiosity would overcome him; he was always curious, wanting to know more. If I wanted him, he wanted knowledge. Knowledge was power.

When I'd have broken down his defences, time and again. When he'd get tired of my provocative teasing, and call my bluff. Kisses have never been so sweet or searching, nor have they ever cut me so close. And then he'd shrug his shoulders, and walk away, his drunken loss of inhibition once more tucked away inside that gorgeously stern exterior.

It felt like dying. Of course it didn't; death isn't life and wonder and glory wrapped up in bitterness. To a teenage drama queen (that's emphasis on 'queen', darling) it becomes the death I'd like to die.

There are some things I shall keep to myself. You'll forgive me if I'm not completely open; we luvvies have our little moments of privacy. Little jewelled jealous minutes I keep back all to myself. To cherish. A delusion as thin as fog; weak as paper.

You'll forgive it. I can't quite disentangle my hands from those pieces of him I had.

We all looked to him, you see. The Gryffindors might have called him 'Ferret-boy' (for which I wished to rip Harry Potter's throat out with my teeth) but we called him 'Prince'. Well, that was mostly me, albeit mockingly. I started it.

He was supposed to lead us. I've heard many versions of this story, all of which begin 'if'. Draco Malfoy is supposed to lead us to victory, to safety. To rally all of Slytherin to his side.

The right one.

I'm still waiting.

And when it got awful, when we were all waiting in anticipation rich and thick with anxiety, when the future got up close and personal, he took a way out that I loathe. Oh, not the razor to the throat method.

Oh no.

That I could live with.

One of those mad, bad, sad nights in Hogsmede, when dancing until we were drenched in sweat, writhing in a mass of frustrated humanity that wanted to live so badly that they'd burst, he was beautiful. Filled with all that unresolved potential that could drain away to nothingness with all the glory of youth.

I'm getting poetic in my old age.

I wanted him; wrapped around him as tightly as I could get. Screaming _mine_, to all those other people who might envy me. I got to touch him. I got to run my hand over the damp fabric bunched over his back and shoulders. I got to coil myself serpent close.

I was getting him drunk rather ruthlessly. Who can blame me? When he was drunk, he gave in to me, gave up on all those filthy morals and stiff-upper-lip dignity, and was thoroughly naughty. It's quite expensive getting him drunk. The Malfoy propensity for holding their liqueur. His eyes shine just a little bit when he's properly falling-down pissed. He's even graceful, the sod. I think that if I'd been the prettier, I'd never have bothered with him.

He was ready for just a little nudge in the right direction. And I was ready to give it, but in waltzed destiny, dire and drab as always.

Have I mentioned the times when he came close to crying? He'd never cry properly, and if you tried to tell him he was close, that perhaps he wanted to hug you very tightly, and sob into your shoulder (misery loves company, after all) you had better be two foot shy of where you'd been before because his wand will be out and hexing you before the words finish leaving your mouth. He'd only ever cry when it was desperate. When he'd been so close his fingertips grazed that _bloody_ gold ball, and Harry Potter snatched it from him. When he stood defeated on the platform, in that moment between glory at his achievements and in being the first among us, and the moment he was not-quite-first, when his father didn't like him not being best.

You had to look close to see that moment. It was like stealing from him. He doesn't know it when I watch him that closely. But then, I'm always watching, to read that impenetrable face when the walls are up. Trying to read it. That split moment when everything isn't okay, when I can sneak in and snatch an illusion of sharing closeness, and pain with him. I'll do anything to be close to him, even take it without his permission.

And it was always Harry Potter that wrought that little change in him. Harry Potter and his cronies. I've never been a violent person, I can't punch to save my life, but there were times I wanted to choke the breath from the Boy-Who-Lived, to kill him in one whirl of pain and rage and anger.

I go to fetch that one final drink, two Galleons a glass. He has a thing about Scotch. Particular, bloody-minded. As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to get drunk, get drunk, never mind the route. He's fussy, has standards. So whenever I wanted to get him truly sloshed, I had to shell out the better half of my bank vault to do it.

Have you ever had a moment where the world slips on its axis? When you know if you'd just done something else; not gone to take a slash, not chosen to chat to that person, not bought a drink at the bar when you knew he'd just take a few moments longer this way, it would have gone on turning, as it should have done? It shudders, thrown off course for that brief minute out of time, when it matched the way it _should_ have been. And then it goes turning on.

I think I dropped the glass. I don't know what else I would have done with it; I loathe Scotch. I like to think I dropped it rather than put it on the bar; the smash would have been so much more melodramatic.

I've never liked dark hair, mine is the exception, and seeing his hands, long and white and elegant, threaded through it made me feel distinctly sick. Potter just isn't meant to be seen that way, the sacrificial lamb thrown to Voldemort is supposed to be pure as the driven snow. Innocent.

The way he was thoroughly being ransacked by a Draco I'd trained to be that dominant in that expert, deliciously ruthless way, I think the snow had been pissed on.

Of course, I listened to him. If you don't understand now, you never will. I don't tell it for understanding, I tell it because I've always wanted to have attention. Tell me you adore me, tell me I'm sublime, that I'm ridiculously wonderful, and I'm yours forever to keep in your pocket, darling. I don't particularly want to keep me, anyway.

I listened, because I still had some of him. As a friend, I was still tied in to him. I was there during the long, less than coherent discussions, when I wanted to be violently ill, shake him, kiss him, kill him. I'd never driven him to an uncontrolled handle on his words. Elocution came before I did.

Please don't delude yourself into thinking I mooned over him forever. I was sixteen, gay and locked into a boarding school with lots of boys with no access to the girls' dorms. I didn't mind doing the dirty; I was in high demand. I found others.

And when it all went horrifically _wrong_, I was probably in bed at the time. Those things were always done at blackest midnight, by the time I'd found someone nice and dragged them off home.

I take some comfort from the fact that even _he_ couldn't hold him.

I don't think I want to do this anymore. I don't care, do go away. Please.

Because I lost him, recently. It wasn't back when Potter shoved his filthy tongue in his mouth. I never had Draco like _that_ I lost him the moment that quest for knowledge and power became surrender. I went along with it too, you see.

I'll see him tomorrow, you know. First time in _years_, he's been more prolific than I have. Well, power's a turn on to some, you see. I'd take advantage of that, who wouldn't? I'll see him for the first time in years. He'll probably still be devastatingly handsome, you know. The same blue eyes and that gorgeous hair.

I can tell myself that we'll have been together, forever. Right up until… Death. The dreadful thing is, I'm a terrible liar.

I know what it's like to love someone and lose him. If I carry on saying it, perhaps it'll come true. Perhaps it'll be like Arthur and Lancelot. Well really, who believes that rot about Guinevere? Sweaty men in war camps, darling do be serious. Perhaps I won't have to see him at all.

Perhaps, that will be better.


End file.
